Former owner of country club facing foreclosure

Fifty-nine acres of prime land in Sutton — right next to the Pleasant Valley Country Club, with some frontage on Route 146 — is scheduled to be sold in a foreclosure auction next month.

The auction, being held by the Bank of New England of Salem, N.H., will be held in front of the house at 96 Armbsy Road at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 2.

If the four parcels of land are indeed sold at auction it will place the period at the end of the sentence for the real estate holdings of Edward “Ted” J. Mingolla of West Boylston.

Mr. Mingolla owned Pleasant Valley Country Club for decades and saw it through its heyday as a course for PGA events, when golf legends Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino and Phil Mickelson played there. The club hosted 33 PGA Tour events and 14 LPGA Tour events, including seven LPGA Championships. But the club hosted its last PGA or LPGA event in 1999.

Mr. Mingolla was forced to sell his beloved country club in 2010 after several years of financial struggles, and now he appears poised to lose the undeveloped land around the country club as well.

Mostly vacant save for one falling down house and another small outbuilding, the 59 acres consists of three parcels along Armsby Road and one facing Route 146. In all, the parcels are assessed at $1.2 million. According to the town assessor’s records, the four parcels sold for $650,000 in 2003, but it was a sale from the Pleasant Valley Corp. — which Mr. Mingolla controlled — to Armsby Realty LLC, which Mr. Mingolla controls. It is unlikely that sale nine years ago reflects the land’s true value.

I reached Mr. Mingolla by phone at his home this week. He is hard of hearing, and the short conversation I had with him consisted of me yelling into the phone, then waiting for his answer, then yelling again. My colleagues in the newsroom all briefly stopped what they were doing to listen in (not that they had a choice).

I asked him about the land.

“I own the land,” he replied.

What about the foreclosure auction?

“You’ll have to ask Bank of New England about that,” he said.

When it was apparent that that was all he was willing to say, I thanked him, loudly, and hung up. His lawyer in New Bedford, Randall Weeks Jr., did not return my call.

The majority of the land in question was once slated to become an over-55 retirement community, which was controversial in town at the time because of its sheer size.

The plan had proposed a 200-plus-unit retirement community, to consist of 182 “hotel-style” units and 31 cottage-style units.

In reaction to the plan, town meeting voters in October 2008 passed new regulations that limit the size of any structure in such a proposal to 25,000 square feet, and increase the distance between buildings from 25 feet to 75 feet.

Mr. Mingolla told the Telegram & Gazette in 2010 that he had a $4 million purchase-and-sale agreement for the property, which at that point included 77 acres, but the sale fell through.

“It’s frustrating, because it was 85 to 90 percent permitted,” Mr. Mingolla said to the paper in 2010. “Then the market softened, and it just went away.”

Mr. Mingolla refinanced a loan with the Bank of New England for a higher interest rate, with the expectation that he could pay off the loan quickly with the $4 million land sale.

“When that didn’t work, it put us in a real big hole,” Mr. Mingolla told the T&G at the time.

The Mingolla land, by the way, has nothing to do with The Villas at Pleasant Valley Country Club, a 110-unit upscale single-family-home development adjacent to the fairways of the country club. Phase one is complete with about 40 homes built; phase two is under way. The development’s website says the luxury homes that back up onto the fairways of the 8th, 9th and 17th holes are being eagerly snapped up at $599,000 each.

That project once hit a financial snag as well when developer Jon R. Leclair Builders of Grafton filed for bankruptcy in 2009. The development has been picked up by Black Brook Realty of Hopkinton.

John Burns, president of Black Brook Realty, was angry at first that I had made the mistake of thinking that the foreclosed parcels that belong to Mr. Mingolla might somehow affect his project, which is still going forward. But then he talked to me amicably about Mr. Mingolla’s property.

“We’ve been watching with interest what is happening there,” he said.

Contact Aaron Nicodemus by email at anicodemus@telegram.com or at (508) 793-9245.